The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has invited members of the public to comment on Amazon's proposed acquisition of UK-based The Book Depository.
"Anticipated acquisition by Amazon.com Inc. of The Book Depository International Limited – issued 5 July 2011," reads a notice on the OFT website.
It then advises interested parties to …

WTF

Because....

The Book Depository

They're actually pretty good

You've missed out. Their stock is not so good as Amazon, but it's still pretty vast. As a general rule of thumb, they're significantly cheaper and they offer free delivery. To the world. That's right, free delivery to the world (although they don't manage to deliver everywhere - there are countries they cannot deliver to).

They also have a charming habit of telling you the cost of the same book at amazon and at abebooks, depending on circumstances.

Not in customers best interests

As a long term customer of both retailers I believe the competion between them is very important. The Book Depository has offered a free delivery option on purchases for some time and this is a much valued service appreciated by UK customers and by so many customers in territories where books are much more expensive (New Zealand for instance) or the choice is more restricted.

Amazon delivery charges are expensive, particularly for overseas customers where Amazon has no local delivery outlet. A point acknowledged recently when they half heartedly offered free delivery using a convoluted and unfriendly option themselves.

Although the Amazon buying experience is a lot slicker than the Book Depository and many retail prices offered by Amazon are slightly cheaper, the Book Depository free delivery option often represents far better overall value for money.

The loss of the Book Depository will be a major loss of competition and not be in the interests of customers in the UK or overseas.

Sorry...

Slicker?

"Although the Amazon buying experience is a lot slicker than the Book Depository and many retail prices offered by Amazon are slightly cheaper, "

Slicker how? Since buying a Kindle 3 last year, I've also been buying more dead tree books (as you rightly say, they are EXPENSIVE up here at the top of the world in Aotearoa), and all the ones I've bought have been through Book Depository. I've found their ordering process no slower or more convoluted than Amazon's (except for 1-click) and most importantly, not one of the books I bought through them was available cheaper on Amazon, even before shipping charges.

You do realise...

Not in NZ's best interest

As Ian Farrell points out above, this is bad news for New Zealand and probably a lot of other countries. Our major high street book chain has just been bought out of bankruptcy caused, they say*, by competition from Amazon and TBD. Books are hideously expensive over here and, although the media seem only to have heard of Amazon, most of us use TBD due to the free shipping and wide stock range. We've never had it so good.

Of course, I doubt whether this will be of any concern to OFT.

*Most people outside Whitcoulls PR department say something similar but with different pronunciation e.g. "poor management".

Not just pricing

The thing that concerns me about this is not so much the pricing aspect, but that The Book Depository stocks vast numbers of out-of-print items that Amazon won't touch. Once Amazon buys them, I can't really see this no doubt low margin part of their business carrying on in the longer term.

Print on demand

To amplify on the subject of out of print, they founded their own press (Dodo) to reprint them. Which is just brilliant. I really get the feeling that the head bod actually likes books and likes selling books to people.

If they are being bought essentially to be shut down...

Amazon sharks confirm free market is a myth

Great, I was boycottying amazon for censoring wikileaks (on cloud computing), and since last december I've only brought english books from the bookdepository. Now they are eliminating the only real alternative, for stocks and prices, for those who don't want to give money to amazon.

They already have a 70%-strong market dominance (for books) in the uk only, and they are allowed to do mergers instead of splitting up? WTF is the anti-trust? Enjoy capitalism.

this does seem odd

What possible justification can Amazon have for this? They're an online retailer, it's not like they want to buy more stores to expand, anybody who wants to shop with them already can. They're the biggest bookseller in the world, it's not like they lack for scale. They're the biggest in the UK, it's not like they lack for brand recognition.